Christopher Marcum

Christopher Steven Marcum, Ph.D., is a staff scientist and methodologist at the NIH's National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) within the Social Network Methods Section of the Social and Behavioral Research Branch. Chris received his doctoral degree in sociology from the University of California-Irvine and completed his postdoctoral training in economics and statistics at RAND. His program of research focuses on network dynamics of health communication and social behavior within families challenged with heritable disease. He is an advocate for plain language communication of social science to broad audiences. Outside of work he enjoys photography, software development, and playing out the fantastical adventures of his young son's imagination while hiking through the forest.

Posts By This Author

The Social Side of Health

Understanding Social and Behavioral Research in the IRP

Tuesday, December 3, 2019

The NIH IRP is world-renowned for its high-risk, high-reward biomedical research. While the NIH may be best known for its clinical and biomedical research on topics from cancer to allergies to addiction, IRP investigators have also produced a rich body of work conducted in the area of social and behavioral research (SBR). In this post, I will describe how SBR furthers the NIH’s goals of improving human health with some examples of the excellent work done by SBR investigators in the IRP.